LOVE AND CULTURE

by W. B. Macomber

Chapter Five) ROMANTICISM, GENIUS, AND CRIMINALITY

Einstein as Phaedrus' ideal of love; Platonic love and the problem of society at the top; living at the second order; how thinking must alter with conditions; writing and correspondence; the movement of history and the strange things that go on there; Phaedrus and the power of concentration, attention, devotion; the adolescent, the romantic, the genius, and the criminal; battle heroism and death; conflict, individuality, and reconciliation; Galileo as untarnished hero and no martyr.

. . . Romeo Montague, Albert Einstein, W.B. Macomber. I'm thrilled if anyone got that one. The answer is: Albert Einstein. Einstein is Phaedrus' ideal of love. With W.B. Macomber a close second. Einstein because he manifests concentration and devotion, capable, as Phaedrus argues, of transforming the world. Concentration and devotion can produce power capable of transforming the world. That is young Phaedrus' plea for romanticism, his justification of the "grand passion."

Now since Einstein has transformed the world, and I haven't, he is Phaedrus' ideal of love. Not Romeo, because that is a sort of youthful, touching, marvelous sort of love, with a tragic end, but that sort of thing is never going to transform the world, and Einstein has, or will.

In another of the questions, there were the aims of the course: "Which of the following is not an aim of the course?” You should study over those questions, because the questions are themselves meant to teach you something. As I say, the exam is part of and not simply an index of the learning process.

One of the aims of the course is to transform the world from top to bottom and from bottom to top. No, from top to bottom, but not from bottom to top. Transforming the world from bottom to top is what we have attempted hitherto. Transforming the world from top to bottom is the undertaking I now propose. For the suffering at the bottom of our society, the injustice, inequality, the misery which obtains in our society, which is also the wealthiest, most powerful, daydreamy society which ever existed—about this I can't do very much, and everybody else is concerned with it anyway. In this case I want you to think over all the wrong answers. That was the point of the question. The right answer was quite pointless. Wrong answers are interesting too, and I want you to pay attention to them. Freud is as important for his mistakes (e.g. about women) as for his discoveries. When you come to appreciate wrong answers, you might listen more carefully to your friends' and parents' wrongheaded views. (They're interesting!) That's what philosophy is all about.

I want to transform life from top to bottom, to reduce the suffering at the top, the suffering in the White House, in the $60,000 ranch-style bungalow, with 3 automobiles and a swimming  pool, and trips to Europe any time you like. That's where the suicide rate is high—not in the lower class, among people living at the margin, struggling for survival, but among people living in affluence and abundance, amidst pleasure and limitless possibility. This is where I want to go, and suggest to them things they can do with their lives.

Now what can the American middle class do with their lives? They can lead a life of imagination, at what philosophers call the second order. I want to introduce a new appreciation of the second order. The first order is the world of things, physical objects, events, facts people. The second order is the world of formulae, formulations, words (and numbers), explanations, arguments, works of art. We have thus far very little appreciation of the second order. In cultivating the imagination and introducing a new type of relationship which I call "Platonic love," I want to get people to live more in the second order, in and with words, and with one another through words.

I'm convinced we must learn to live more in imagination, to enjoy the power and pleasure of words and works of art (books, movies, photographs, buildings, landscapes, cuisine), to be with one another in a new way—not sharing difficulties, as we do on the frontier, when a man and woman marry and settle down  to fell trees and carve out a life together. This is the basis of their love—their real love—for one another; they're weaving their lives together; they depend upon one another for their lives. That's why they love one another, and monogamy is strong in the 19th century, culminating in the marvelous household of Clarence Day's Life with Father. There's the splendor of the monogamistic tradition. A man and a woman, weaving their lives, hewing back the forest, creating a life for themselves and their children.

Now, however, conditions have changed completely. We no longer depend on one another at all. We have frozen foods and wonderfabrics and skyscrapers and Time Magazine, and everything is taken care of for us. We don't need one another, and consequently the old form of loving, grounded in need at the biological level, is in trouble, has crumbled at the center.

Remember I began to contest monogamy very early on, when I was considering the practical way of getting the best possible education. I said first, if you want to learn how to talk, you have to get into a big thing with someone, and talk about everything; my course, every course, the book, the movie, everything. And then a little later I said: if you want to learn how to write, you must fall deeply in love with someone far away, and tell them all about everything in letters. That's the only way to learn how to write.

That's the way I learned to write, because I was incurably romantic, like young Phaedrus, and fell passionately, madly in love for the first time when I was 25 and my serious graduate study was just beginning. I learned how to write not by writing for my professors at the University of Toronto, for whom I wrote only about 100 pp. a year. I learned to write for my friend Gaius, Karl-Josef Frey, for whom I wrote ten times that, year after year. That's why I say, if you want to learn how to write, you have to fall madly in love with someone far way, and tell them all about your life, capture everything in letters: the people around you, the lectures you hear, the books you  read, the movies you see, the theories you're thinking over, the problems you have, everything.

Learning must be fun, Prof. Dewey teaches us, and what's more fun than love-letters? We must bathe learning, and our whole lives, in the warmth and pleasure of libido. That's Plato (in the Phaedrus and Symposium) and Dewey and Freud. Well, to learn how to talk, it appears, you have to fall in love with someone close by, and to learn how to write, you have to be in love with someone far away. And from this we can draw what philosophers call a deduction, namely that I am opposed to the monogamistic principle.

One relationship for all time was enough for us once, under conditions of poverty, difficulties, suffering, survival conditions generally. The institution of monogamy worked brilliantly for 2,000 years. When I oppose it, it's not ex post facto, retroactively. I don't want to attack that great fundamental institution of our society which has brought us to this marvelous point. Similarly, I don't want to attack the Catholic Church, which has produced Descartes, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and me! But notice these curious products of the Catholic Church, Descartes, Joyce, Yeats. They are not what we call "good Catholics."

Take Descartes. In the preface to his Discourse on Method, which opens the modern era of history, he says: I submit any claim made in this book to the judgment of the learned professors of sacred theology of the Sorbonne. If they find anything faulty, I abjure it in advance. It is wrong—consign it to the flames. Your humble and obedient servant, Rene Descartes.  That's the message that is going to open a new era of history.

What Descartes argues in the Discourse on Method is that everything we have believed up until now is utter nonsense, mumbojumbo. And he proposes to flatten it in a single stroke. God doesn't speak the language of Latin theology—that's mumbojumbo, all that stuff, which has gotten us nowhere in 1600 years. God speaks the "clear and distinct" language of mathematics. And he, Rene Descartes, is going to teach us how to understand this language, and employ it to transform the world, to make us  "lords and masters of creation." What 16 centuries have accomplished, he is going to flatten, wipe out clean, to begin anew.

The old feudal structure is doomed after Descartes and so is the power of priests, monsignors, bishops, cardinals and popes. The Church, which held sway over all of Europe, will now remain only in the sensual South, in Bavaria, Austria, Italy, and Spain. The North goes Protestant, and more energetic, and sets out to transform the world. Well, Descartes can't come right out and say this, and consequently the arguments are a little difficult to understand. They are curious arguments, many of which come right down from the Middle Ages. But there is in that book a concealed message. The concealed message is: Everything we have attempted up until now is false, and I am going to flatten it. I, Rene Descartes, shall now raise the curtain on world history. Let the drama begin, and I will be its choreographer. Here is a project which will enable men to work  collectively, not with a language and terminology which has produced nothing in 1600 years, but with a method based on sound, proper reasoning, based especially on an understanding  of the quantitative—that is to say, natural science. Descartes then proceeds to lay out the project of natural science, which leads to technology, and directs the last 350 years of our development.

So Descartes is beginning a new epoch of history, and is going to wipe away the old mediaeval church. But the old mediaeval church still has the power. We see this in the case of my distinguished predecessor, Professor Bruno, who is burned, and Professor Galileo, who is hailed before the Inquisition, and asked whether what he is teaching is the truth or a lie. Without the slightest hesitation, Galileo replies, "A lie. The whole thing is a lie. My life is a lie." He's sent to a monastery to say prayers for 3 years and allowed to remain among us.

Copernicus is the cleverest of all. He never published his revolutionary treatise On Revolutions (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) until the very end, when Professor Georg Joachim Rheticus pleads with him to put the manuscript into world history: "We must move ahead, we must understand the heavens. You understand the heavens. People are still thinking with the crazy old model of Ptolemy!" Rheticus finally has his way, prints up 200 copies or so, hastens to Copernicus with the first copy off the press, and reaches him on the day of his death. Copernicus sees his "baby" on the day of his death.  What timing! It beats even L.B.J.'s announcement of the discontinuation of the bombing of N. Vietnam, a fortnight before the presidential election of 1968, otherwise perhaps the greatest timing in history.

I'm a bit bolder and more outspoken than Galileo, or Copernicus, or Descartes. That's a change in history. Twenty years ago I could never have said the things I say from this august stage, any more than there could be a folk musical called Jesus Christ, Superstar, or a great orchestral-operatic work like Leonard Bernstein's Mass, celebrating the desecration of the most sacred symbol of society. Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable that I stand up here and inveigh against Christianity, revel in egoism, and talk about all the intimate details of my sex-life and fantasy world. Seventy years ago one couldn't teach at Yale if one were not a practicing Christian, because of President Noah Porter's concern for the spiritual welfare of his students. No one would have told me I couldn't—it simply wouldn't have occurred to me.

Well, I was on my attitude toward the past, toward monogamy and Catholicism—or Christianity generally. I don't want to attack monogamy for your parents and grandparents—that was marvelous. Look at these people on old photographs! You can see in the photographs that they're strong; their lives are about something. They're happy and vigorous, and you can see it in old photographs, those strange old things, sometimes in sepia, out of Life With Father, and the era I grew up in (the 30's), which I call the world of Thornton Wilder. The notion that the most brilliant products of the Catholic Church should be Descartes, Joyce, Yeats and Macomber is what German philosophers call dialectic. Things are bound together in very subtle, mysterious ways, things which produce their opposite.

Well, I'm trying to teach you about Phaedrus' speech on romanticism, and I suggested that the sort of love that Phaedrus is talking about need not only be total devotion to a person. It can also be total devotion to a thing, wood or clay or sounds or chess or speculative physics or philosophy, e=mc2 or Plato's Symposium. That sort of concentration, Phaedrus says, is capable of transforming life—at least a life—and we see how this is possible in Einstein's case. Einstein didn't hit on E = Mc² because he had a higher I.Q. than you but because he cared more than you. He cared so much more than you that he virtually belongs to a different species. Friedriech Nietzsche says we have drawn the lines, we have made our cuts, in the wrong places. There's a greater distance between Albert Einstein and Ronald Reagan than between Ronald Reagan and the cow—by far. Einstein is simply incomprehensible to us; Einstein is as incomprehensible to  Reagan as Reagan is to the cow.

Through that crazy formula, E = Mc², that Einstein cared about so much, he participated directly in godhead, in my view. He participated in godhead by playing a prominent role in the evolution of human life on this planet. We ordinarily misunderstand Einstein. We think that essentially he's missing it. Einstein has no fun. He can hardly cope with a door-knob or mow a lawn! He's incapacitated at the first order, because his being is totally concentrated and committed at the second order. That's why he's not too sure what one does with doorknobs and lawns. Einstein's being consists not in a superior I.Q. but in fantastic motivation, energy, caring. Sir Isaac Newton was asked how he came across his great discovery, which would create a new world, and he replied, Nocte dieque incuban-  do—by thinking about it (incubating it) night and day. That's the secret of greatness, genius, the marvel which Phaedrus is talking about in his speech. He talks about it in mythic language, in symbols and myths, talks a language that seems to apply to Romeo and Juliet, to personal love-affairs, but applies best to genius.

Phaedrus' speech is a speech about genius, and the romantic dimension of genius, with its total commitment to a specialized area of creativity. The genius gives up a full and complete life to concentrate on one thing, and one thing only, in order to realize greatness there. Bobby Fisher, it is said, found all the world he needed in one square foot of space. The principle of gases, that as you restrict the area to which a gas is applied, pressure is increased, illustrates the principle of Phaedrus' approach to life: concentrate, reduce the area of your commitment, and you will develop energy, tremendous energy, like focusing sunlight through a lens, until you reach what the Germans call Brennpunkt, a point of such immense concentration of light and heat that it bursts into flame, and the flame is E = Mc².

This is certainly the principle of genius, as Newton tells us, and Phaedrus seems to articulate it with admirable clarity. (Whether it applies in human relations is another matter.) Now all this is kind of scary, of course. We see how scary it is in the case of Descartes, who can't come right out and say to his feudal lords and the ecclesiastical men who control the world, "Look, I'm going to flatten your world. I'm going to start a new drama, by Rene Descartes." He has to conceal it. The concealment is part of the game, as with Copernicus and Sir Thomas More, fighting for his life in A Man For All Seasons.

So Denis de Rougemont argues in Passion and Society that Tristan and Isolde is about lawless love, adultery, and this is why it is concealed in the form of a myth, so that people who read and  rejoice in it don't know what they're reading, don't know that such love subverts the institution of monogamy on which society is based. Isolde, you see, is the wife of King Mark, and Tristan his nephew, and they have a clandestine love-affair which is immensely exciting, partly because it is illicit, lawless. So for centuries we go on believing in our monogamistic institutions, and hail Tristan and Isolde as a great work of literature, with no idea that the two are profoundly in conflict. In other words, we don't know how to read.

Well, I began by arguing that Phaedrus' speech was about romantic love, and then about adolescence, and now about genius, creativity. It's about all these things, and how they all hang together. The principle symbols with which Phaedrus' mind works are: battle, heroism, and death. I want just briefly to unpack these symbols, to give you an idea how symbols work.

Battle is a situation in which your being is totally concentrated. Whether you're a French soldier sneaking up on a house inhabited by Germans, or Achilles and Hector circling in deadly conflict before the gates of Troy, your being is totally concentrated on something outside yourself. Apart from falling down stairs (Jeff Mason's favorite example)—and perhaps in the moment we first see a being of surpassing beauty and fascination—our entire being is never so concentrated. That's the conflict situation, being totally concentrated on something outside oneself, which produces superhuman effort and achievement.

We're capable of superhuman achievement, according to Phaedrus, when we're totally concentrated on something outside ourselves. Hypnosis illustrates this: one can lay a man across the backs of two chairs, I've heard, and stand on him. Absolutely superhuman, and produced by concentration.of which we're not normally capable. Einstein is superhuman in this way. He might as well be a man hypnotized. Plato would say he's in the grips of a "divine madness," theia mania. He's a man possessed.

There's another thing about the hero. The hero is the man who moves immediately, the man we simply follow, without listening, reasoning, understanding, agreeing, and then following. Adlai Stevenson once compared himself with John Kennedy and quoted an ancient Greek orator who said the difference between himself and Pericles was that when he spoke, men said, "How well he spoke!" But when Pericles spoke, men said, "Let us march!" The hero figure is the man who moves immediately, like Winston Churchill. When Churchill thunders, "We will fight and fight—we will nevah surrendah!," he's a hero, and moves all England with him, irrationally, immediately, compulsively. El Cid performs his last great feat when he's no longer alive. They prop his corpse on a horse and send it galloping towards the Moors, and the whole Spanish army moves out. The hero moves people without the necessity of logic, inference, calculation—all that Pausanias stuff. So the hero's effect is hypnotic. I think that's the best way to put it.  Churchill was more hypnotic than Hitler. He certainly didn't have better arguments in the days after Dunkerque.

This is the case with great thinkers and artists as well. Plato has moved us, but not because we've seen what he is all about. We get the power and greatness of art without understanding it. I've already shown how little we've understood Tristan and Isolde or the Bible, and yet these have been powerful works which have moved us immensely—most of all the Bible, which Rick Long calls "the one authenticated miracle of Christianity."

And finally the symbol of death. Death in young Phaedrus' mind is not real death—not having one's head smashed in an automobile accident. Real death is messy. I mean the only way to speak of it, it seems to me, is as messy. Dostoyevsky reminds us that, if we were to be killed by a boulder dropped from, say, 100 feet, it wouldn't hurt. It would be like switching off the lights--that clean. But we can't think of it that way. We think of it—I do, anyway—as messy. That's the only reason I'm afraid of it (not of not being or of what I might wake up to). I suppose this is because death is an unimaginable transition which it only makes sense to think of occurring gradually (like dimming lights) and that's messy. But not the death in Phaedrus' mind. It's something ideal and sublime, and must  therefore stand for some form of transcendence—relief, release, the "death" experienced in the act of love. Not real death or existentialist death—young Phaedrus is not an existentialist. It's the way two adolescents might dream of dying for one another, perhaps to music by Richard Wagner, the Liebestod, or the way orators talk at Memorial Day ceremonies: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. To which George Harrison replies, "Nothing is worth dying for—nothing!"

Now we must see these three symbols together. Concentration on something in the outer world, with the intensity of a lens focusing sunlight on a single point, produces an immense power capable of overcoming all resistance (all out reasoning about what can be and cannot be) and lifts us out of ourselves, like the experience of great tragedy, so that we are no longer nailed to our facticity (as Sartre would put it), our lonely and confined position in space and time, where we see everything sub specie temporis et loci, and experience a new sense of  transcendence and ecstasy which is like getting out of the  body, being freed from gravity, and soaring. The feeling Bach and Mozart must have had so often, and left recorded in their music, for anyone who has ears to hear. The feeling Prince Andre Boklonsky has in War and Peace, lying wounded on the field of Borodino, when he is overcome for the first time by the immensity of the heavens.

To get Phaedrus' message, you must feel the connection between battle, heroism, and death—competition, devotion, and the thrill of creativity, being outside oneself (free of the Richard Nixon position, where one plays one's life for omnivorous television cameras), in "another world." That "other world" we've always dreamed of—“another and better world"--is what I call the second order, the world of words and formulae and  thrilling sounds, of Keats' Grecian Urn and Yeats' Sailing to  Byzantium, the world where Bach and Mozart and Donovan and  Peter, Paul & Mary write their music, where Einstein wrestles  with his formulae and Coleridge has the vision of Kubla Khan, where Shel Kaganoff  and Dane Venaas turn their pots and Ludwig Wittgenstein and I our arguments, the world where Archimedes was when the Roman soldiers ran him through. It's the world of art, just as Schopenhauer said—but it's also this world, the sensible, sensual, sensuous world which Schopenhauer could never appreciate, when we come back to it, refreshed and easy, having shed the burden of our problems for a while, and see it as though for the first time, with eyes, hearts and pores all wide open. Bach coming down from a Magnificat, as I like to  put it, and rejoicing contentedly at life with everyone around  him, with everyone who can.

We shall not cease from exploration 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time.

I see all this in Phaedrus' masterful formula of "battle, heroism, and death." Similarly I translate Hobbes from the marketplace to the artist's studio, from J.P. Morgan to Michelangelo, and his formula of "conflict, egoism, power," becomes "competition, individuality, and expression, creativity, communication." After I've made that translation, I then take another look at J.P. Morgan and find him as breathtaking as Michelangelo, only in a somewhat less exciting game—the only difference I see between Kant and Mohammed Ali, or Clarence Darrow and Bobby Fisher. I'm not trying to put Mohammed Ali and Fisher down. For them it's all the same, I think; for us there's a difference. The wrestler cannot defend the philosopher; the philosopher must defend the wrestler.

At any rate, if you get that formula, if you see the connection between battle, heroism and death, you'll have the gist of the romantic temperament. The point is not in the isolated symbols (or concepts) but in their relation, the way one moves right into the next. This is what Hegel calls making thinking move, or making ideas fluid, and it doesn't mean that everything is swept up in the great orchestration of Wagnerian Musikerama.

Then there are the three situations which appeared in the exam: Alcestis, Achilles, and Orpheus. Those are the three stories that Phaedrus works with in his speech, and I had never attempted to draw them all together. Greg Desilet, a student in my upper division class, did that last quarter and taught me how those three situations hang together. So five questions on your exam came not really from me, but from Greg Desilet. Brilliant! The three myths hang together in this way: Alcestis accepts death, and that's great; Achilles pursues death, and that's greater still; but Orpheus wants to cling to life (like Galileo, Falstaff, and George Harrison) and that is not so very great.

So in our tradition, if you're not prepared to die for something, you're not living for anything. That's the central assumption, I think, underlying our Christian background: if you're not prepared to die for something, you're not living for anything. We must give up this world, give up everything in our hearts, including the rage to live. Our chief heroes are martyrs, whose greatness is voluntary death, and nothing more. This finally leads to the behavior of young Russian Hussars, for example, who play Russian roulette, bolting down a bottle of vodka standing on a 4th story window-ledge, to show that for them life is cheap, and to keep quiveringly alive. Nietzsche remarks on the paradox that it is ordinarily those with the least to lose who are the most reluctant to risk their lives.

George Harrison is attacking a very fundamental assumption of our tradition when he says, "Nothing is worth dying for—nothing." It's the wisdom of the East that "the wise man steps aside." Galileo is following an Eastern, rather than a Western, approach to life when he "steps aside," and is prepared to declare that his scientific investigations are worthless. "In times of peace the wise man exerts a powerful and beneficent influence on the community, and in times of turmoil and upheaval, he survives." That's Odyssean cleverness. You can fault old Galileo. You can say, "You phony, you're not prepared to stand behind your life, and your approach to the world. You're summoned before men of power, the men who rule the world, and you reveal yourself, when the chips are down, as a cowardly nonentity. You stand before the Court of the Inquisition and debase yourself." I say Galileo didn't even tarnish his greatness, which is wholly of the second order. And anyway, he survived, the gentle Galilean. That's Odyssean, Odyssean cunning. I approve Galileo (and Falstaff) because I don't care so much about objectivity and truth. If I were ever held to accounting for anything I say to you from this stage, I'd  renounce it all in an instant. In fact, I abjure it all in advance, like Descartes. I don't believe a word of it. (Now you really have to think, don't you?)

Well, I'd better leave it there, and I'm still not finished with Phaedrus. You see, it comes at you gradually. I want you thinking about the speeches as I talk. You should already be into Pausanias, the second speaker.

 
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